Friday 26 December 2008

Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2 / Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights / Emanuelle and the Porno Nights

You could be forgiven for getting confused here: the original Le Notti porno di mondo, also directed and edited by Bruno Mattei under his Jimmy Mathews pseudonym, featured Laura Gemser, but did not reference her Emanuelle character in its title.


Gemser's introductions / linkings have a certain something...

Regardless, the two films are pretty much interchangeable, featuring similar mondo-style supposedly from around the world but predominantly shot in the same Rome studios. Be it the USA, France or Germany the nightclubs and their audiences look the same, with bottles of J&B prominently placed on just about every table.

The first scenes here depicts a séance that segues into a black mass, complete with virgin deflowering in the name of Satan and one of those peculiarly sexless softcore orgy numbers.

Next we get a Parisian magician who specialises in making clothes disappear and doing the rising cloth routine with a detachable erection that may or may not belong to a nude dwarf who then runs through the audience; an adult version of Luna Park, where an on-leave soldier wins a blow-up sex doll and another person of restricted growth is triumphant with a kind of test your strength machine into which the men insert their penises; and a Lady Godiva routine that hints at a beauty and the bestiality scenario with her pony but doesn't go as far as Emanuelle in America nor La Bete.

This is followed by Ajita Wilson, photographing a lesbian sex show and addressing us straight to camera like Gemser; a Japanese penis transplant operation - here a male voice, purportedly that of a professor, is used to provide extra gravitas - and some New Guinea mating rituals of dubious authenticity as far as the virginity testing of the young women goes if not the stock footage of pigs being clubbed to death for a feast.


The usual mondo footage of animals qua meat

Dwarves are again the order of the day for the subsequent segment, a Biancaneve-themed routine, while detachable phalluses feature in the next, featuring a bodybuilder and his fan club of predominantly middle-aged women.


Biancaneve

Things are rounded off with a report from the making of a porn film; a couple of women wrestling in foam; a science-fiction themed dance routine cum strip show; an Italian stripping housewife TV program and footage from a US nudist event.

While all of the material has a certain historical and sociological interest - Is this what passed for shocking entertainment? What was with the fascination with dwarves? - it is this last sequence that is probably the most interesting precisely because of its status as actuality footage, albeit obviously edited by Mattei into something more interesting. The bodies on display aren't merely those of attractive young women, as predominate elsewhere within the film, but are more balanced between the sexes and across the age spectrum, imparting an appropriately grotesque and carnivalesque tone.

1 comment:

Stephen Grimes said...

Recently watched the English version of this,alot more enjoyable than some of the other Mattei doc's though i still prefer the earlier mondo's like De Sisti's INGHILTERRA NUDA and Sergio Martino's WAGES OF SIN.